"It was a clever turn of luck," lightly responded Reynolds, "or, perhaps I should say fate. No doubt it is ordered that you and I shall yet work out together some subtle decree of Providence. After all, incidents and events do not come of haphazard."
"I never philosophize, you know," said Moreton. "I am never expecting any thing save the very thing I am looking and striving for. I was turkey hunting when I found your outlandish cabin. What the deuce are you doing over there?"
"That is a hard question. I have spent some delightfully quiet, uneventful years in that house. I find good shooting at times, the air is pure and sweet, the water is excellent, the retirement is perfect." Reynolds paused for a time and then continued: "Oh well, I had grown tired of wandering and rather disgusted with the world in general and I fancied I should enjoy being a hermit for a while. I tried it and found it charming."
Moreton thought he detected evidence in his friend's manner of a reserve of some stronger reasons for thus hiding himself away from the world; but he took the explanation without further question.
"That's a pretty lass of White's," Moreton said, after the conversation had rambled over such parts of Reynolds' life for the past few years as he cared to lay bare. "Her sweet, solemn, smiling, troubled face has haunted me ever since I saw her."
Reynolds laughed.
"Don't make too much fun of the poor little thing," he said, half-seriously, half lightly. "Hers is a vacant lot. She is as scentless and colorless as she is cramped and undeveloped. I can't imagine what she was made for."
"But what a form and what a haunting, hungry, sweet face she has!"
Reynolds looked with a sudden surprise into Moreton's eyes, his own dilating. Presently he laughed again.
"I do believe you are in earnest," he exclaimed, in a tone at once deprecatory and querulous, "for you couldn't have the heart, even at this distance, to ridicule the unfortunate little creature. In this region the poor whites are all deplorably ignorant and queer; but she—she is a pathetic cipher, poor thing."